Social Media Marketing in Nepal 2023
Our childhood textbooks taught us that humans are social animals who want to live in groups and societies. Civilizations grew and collapsed; monkeys became human, and the world changed, but this trait of being social is intact from the very origin of our existence.
With the development of technology, our way of being social also changed. Our way of consuming information and news and our way of communicating with our loved ones also changed.
In this fast-growing world, we invented something called Social Media, and we never looked back. Being social at the core of human beings, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. So people started making business out of it. We started marketing in social media, and the way we market our business and products changed.
In this article, I will discuss why you and your business want to be social. Why every business around you are trying to brand itself on social media? Why is every politician on social media, and why do even some dogs and cats have social media accounts?
What is the future of social media marketing, and why you should start it today? Questions will be answered, and you will be treated with extra information. So fasten your seat belt as we go for a long drive to your destination of successful social media marketing in Nepal.
So, What is Social Media Marketing?
You must have heard the word social media till now. Social media has entirely changed the internet; it has changed the whole world and the world of marketing. This is a new way of communicating with your consumers effectively and affordably. It is a platform where you can build relationships with your customers and remain in contact with your loved ones. It is the most powerful tool at this time for marketing and sales in the business world.
The first social media website was started in 1997, called Six Degrees, which enables the user to create a profile and connect with their friends. After the beginning of blogging, social media was used widely all over the internet.
Likewise, newspapers, radio, television, and other traditional media ruled our homes for almost a century. But the need for social media marketing has risen more than ever in Nepal. Social media marketing in Nepal has rapidly grown in this last decade. It’s all about sharing information through internet mediums using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Social media marketing in Nepal has become an effective and affordable way to promote your business products and posts with many successful leads and conversion generation. Nowadays, digital marketing agencies do have a separate social media management team.
Due to easily accessible smartphones, people from children to old everyone are connected to social media. The use of social media doesn’t seem to end ever till the world exists because it provides numerous amount of benefits.
So, why is social media marketing getting on top of online advertising? Let’s discuss everything you need to know about social media marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms to market or advertises your products and services. Every advertisement has a similar purpose of marketing, i.e. to increase brand awareness, increase sales and conversions and drive traffic to the website.
Social media was first created for the purpose of communication and information sharing. But the time has changed in completely different ways. Nowadays, people see social media as a promotional site to promote their business to millions of audiences.
It involves sharing images, videos, advertising, and other content that lure people to their site for their beneficial purpose. It is the most powerful and effective tool to reach your targeted and potential customers.
Now, as the topic targets social media marketing in Nepal, let’s discuss the situation of social media marketing in Nepal.
Current Social Media Marketing Situation in Nepal
Social media marketing is a never-ending source of free online marketing that is available to every individual all over the world. The recent research on social media facts in Nepal shows that Facebook is the leading market with a total of 9,857,000 people, with 32.6% of its entire population.
Likewise, various platforms like Instagram consist of 1,300,800 users, Twitter of 2,300,000, YouTube of 3,800,000, Pinterest of 500,000, LinkedIn of 540,000, and so on, which is growing every day with rapid pace.
Digital marketing agencies are focusing more on their social media factors as it has the largest audience in Nepal. Marketing your business through the use of social media is a bonus that rewards your business.
Usually, companies that sell their products online, like clothes, gadgets, accessories, etc., rely on social media like Facebook and Instagram. Why on Facebook and Instagram? It is because that platform covers the maximum traffic available in Nepal and that platform provides advertising facilities. You can advertise your products to millions of users with less cost and also control your advertisements like you can target your desired audience and desired location for better conversions.
The above image represents the Facebook page of the Sajha Deal, which sells accessories and clothes as their business product. This Facebook page has helped them a lot to increase their brand and business. You can see the likes and followers of the page, which are huge numbers. Social Media platforms, i.e. Facebook, have made their business and sales more convenient and effective.
Likewise, many social media-based businesses, like Daraz, Sasto Deal, etc., promote their products with the help of Facebook.
You might realise that social media marketing is a gem to promote your products and business with many benefits. But not every business is successful in its first attempt. There are many things that you need to consider to get successful in Social Media Marketing.
Things you need to Consider for Social Media Marketing
1. Identifying Your Goals
Set your goals before executing any of your plans. This is a smart business practice everyone should prioritize. You don’t know what your business will turn into in the coming days. So, plan everything with effective strategies that enhance your social media marketing.
Here are some of the effective goals you can set for your business:
- Conduct a social media audit
- Engage with customers
- Driving traffic to your site
- Boosting posts and brand engagement
2. Engaging Contents
Content is the King! If you have really engaging content with graphical attractions like images, videos, gifs, etc., then people will automatically get attracted and engaged in your post. If your content only contains text and ugly images, people won’t stop by your post. They will immediately scroll down for better content that they grab their attention.
Here are the lists of contents that people drive for:
- Videos
Videos are the most engaging and attention-grabbing content you can ever create. It provides more detailed information with proper explanation, and people enjoy watching informative videos rather than text and images contents.
- Images
Images are better with text on it. Catchy text with attractive images works 100% to drag people’s attention. It provides quick information to your viewers.
- Status
Status is a simple text message you can share without effort or creativity. Short and sweet statuses are preferred to the long description in the status box.
- Live Chats
Live chats are similar to video marketing, taking action in the same real-time moment. It is useful for a quick message transfer that is happening at that moment. People usually view more live videos.
So, the initial and primary work you need to perform with 100% attention is creating engaging content, even though it takes days. Because it will drive traffic towards your content and create a high chance of a conversion, the more informative your content is, the better will be your conversion rate.
3. Regular Posts with Activeness
Your activeness creates trust and reliability in your audiences and followers. A good relationship between customer and vendor is always a bonus to the business. So, get active, post regularly if you can, and reply to your customers as soon as possible.
The customers are the gem of your business, so always keep them in high priority and post content targeting their needs and requirements.
Your site ranks better when you are actively involved in social media marketing. Your brand will be displayed more and more in social media that way.
4. Create a larger community
Everyone who desires more traffic to their sites always appreciates the larger community. Followers are the free traffic that you can trust and depend upon. If you lack followers on your pages, no matter how good your content is, there will be fewer people to view your posts.
There won’t be visitors and sales in your business. So, you need to work on collecting your people and creating a larger community because they are your future customers.
What are the Major Benefits of Social Media Marketing in Nepal?
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Sharing on social media directly increases your brand awareness as your brand would be displayed to millions of users. People will learn and know about your brand and business. You can create your business page on social media that boost your brand awareness.
One of the company’s major successes is creating public awareness regarding its business, which can easily be done through social media marketing. You can maintain a good relationship with customers through social media, and it makes work easy to find the customer for your products.
2. Targeting location and audience
Another great facility you can get through social media marketing is targeting your desired location and interested audience to ensure you get high conversions. Your advertising won’t be displayed to the interested individual without targeting your audience. Wrong targeting can highly affect the profitability of your business.
So, your ads should be displayed to those who are highly interested in your products and ready to buy them. It will save you time and cost and increase your sales and conversion rates.
3. Cost-Effective
Social media marketing might be the best cost-effective technique in this era. With less investment, you can get high benefits for your business. Nepal has made good progress in social media marketing through Facebook marketing. People rely on Facebook posts to purchase their requirements, making it easier for businesses to sell their products.
With $1 of post boosts, your post can be shared with thousands of people with targeting options, which is really cost-effective for low investors and beginners.
4. Improve SEO rankings
Social media marketing drags tons of traffic to your site, which is really good in the case of SEO. More traffic every day is a bonus point to your SEO rankings when people view and engage with your content; it increases clicks and impressions.
Social media marketing is an easy way that helps your SEO as it catalyzes rankings. The more people love and view your content, the more your site ranks on Google.
Well, your social traffic doesn’t really affect you a lot, but it helps in ranking. So, never miss sharing your content and blogs on social media for traffic and conversions. It will increase the quality of your website.
5. Improve Customer satisfaction
Having a good relationship with your customers is always better for your business. It increases the customer’s trust and engagement on your every post. To gain trust, you need to satisfy your customers, earning their trust.
Now, for the satisfaction of your customer, you need to improve certain activities on your social media like:
- Improve customer service
Customer service is a key part that you need to involve while connecting with customers. You need to help and solve customers’ problems. Customers can directly contact you, and you can provide a quick response.
- Listen to your customers.
Listen to every word your customer shares with you. They might know more about your business than you. Never ignore their sayings and opinions because they are your business enhancers. Try replying and solving every problem your customers face with your products.
- Build Trust and Reliability
If your customer believes in your business, then the customer will never back down whenever he/she sees your posts on social media. So, be good and polite with every customer of yours and try making a peaceful relationship.
Also, if people believe that they can blindly rely on your products, then in need, they will check your social media account, giving it a high priority.
- Never cheat on your customers.
Not every people believes in social media products because of some fraud activities they might have faced in the early days.
Provide 100% to your customer’s needs. Make your service fast and provide qualitative products just like you display on your social media posts. Be really honest with your customers because they are the ones running your business.
Various platforms of social media marketing in Nepal
1. Facebook
Facebook is the most popular social media marketing platform in Nepal. 32% of the total population is connected to Facebook social media. The use of Facebook in today’s era has changed from communicating, information sharing to social media marketing. People create a Facebook page with their business name and start marketing their business products and services.
Given below are facts of Facebook users of Nepal of stat 2018.
Facebook is Nepal’s most trusted social media platform, where people easily buy and sell their products. It provides the service of Facebook ad management where you can advertise/boost your posts that display to your targeted location and audience for thousands of users in less investment.
It is a cost-effective medium to market your business that provides many facilities for advertising.
Facebook Ads
No doubt, the number of Facebook users is increasing daily and converting their pages into business. Facebook provided this really useful Ad running platform that became a gem for every business to grow more effectively.
We our-self provide this service to our clients who are now growing their online marketing businesses with successful outcomes. Running ads on Facebook makes a better connection with the clients as you can communicate directly whenever needed. Let me list some benefits you can get from Facebook Ads implementation.
- People spend lots of time on Facebook
- Over 1 Billion Users
- You can target your audience and location while advertising
- Awesome for Remarketing
- Turns visitors into Leads and Customers
- Super Easy to manage your ads
- Advertising is cheaper
This is how your Facebook Ads look on the Facebook page. One of the best benefits is that you can add images or even videos to your advertising. It increases your ads’ visibility, and people’s engagement increases automatically.
With the ad manager, you can promote your advertising to thousands of interested people with $1 of money and provide you with around 5000 impressions on your post. Facebook Ads is appropriate for almost every business, like digital marketing, tours and travel agency, fitness, and e-commerce site.
2. Instagram
Instagram is a rapidly growing social media platform in Nepal. Most youth are transferred to Instagram from Facebook as it provides better user experience, qualitative content, faster load speed, and many more.
Given below are the facts of Instagram users in Nepal.
Instagram also provides the facility to run ads campaign for every individual Instagram user. You can get a better audience, sales, and conversion rate on Instagram than on Facebook as the number of users of Instagram is increasing day by day. The business has also spread to Instagram from Facebook, knowing the importance of Instagram in this era of social media marketing.
3. YouTube
YouTube is the second most viewed website in the world, which surely makes Nepal one of them. Nepali YouTubers are becoming more active nowadays, leaving their footsteps in YouTube marketing. Also, people are getting more involved in making vlogs and earning through YouTube.
YouTube also has the facility of running its YouTube ads campaign, which helps a lot in its content marketing. People are making a career on YouTube by creating video content, as YouTube provides attractive money.
4. Twitter
Twitter is not widely used in social media in Nepal, but it also has some craze. It is similar to Instagram, where people share their images, status, and videos. Advertising service is also available on Twitter, but it consists of fewer users in the case of Nepal.
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social media platform where professionals connect and engage for their own benefit. Rather than a communication medium, LinkedIn works more as a business/professional use. People share their professional details and await the request for jobs.
You can also post your business products, posts for marketing purposes and advertise them to millions of users. LinkedIn possesses 590 million globally and 540,000 users in Nepal. As LinkedIn has fewer audiences, marketing on LinkedIn is more relevant. It is great for increasing your brand awareness.
Payment Method Used for Social Media Marketing in Nepal.
This is the part where most people get stuck while running Facebook ads because your debit/credit card is not valid for payment in Nepal. It is clearly an impossible job to get transactions through Nepali debit/credit cards, including Standard Chartered and other FDI banks.
This is why people who want to start online businesses can’t create a career in online marketing because they cannot use Western Union, MoneyGram, etc., to send money outside the country.
Now, for the solution, you can connect your friend living abroad to let you use his/her debit/credit card for your money transactions. Or another easier method that maximum people use is through a website called admanager.com.np which provides you access to pay with Nepali rupee for Facebook ads.
If your business is locally targeted, like daraz.com, sajhadeal.com, custodial, etc., your debit/credit card is valid to pay online because your money remains with the country. An application like Khalti also allows transacting using debit cards. For more, you can use Visa, Mastercard, and SCT.
Effective sales funnel implementation with social media channels.
Generally, people have a mindset of creating social media pages with many followers to view their posts. But unfortunately, you are missing an important link, “Sales Funnel“.
What is Marketing Sales Funnel?
Marketing Sales Funnel is the journey of a customer from his/her first visit to your site all the way up to conversion. It consists of three steps top, middle, and bottom.
Generally, this funnel works as filtering people who actually end up being customers. The top funnel consists of those (Leads) aware of our products and might be interested in engaging in the posts for further process. Then comes the middle funnel (prospects) that shows interest and gets engaged in your post but couldn’t be customers. And finally, comes the bottom of the funnel with opportunists and winners. Opportunists are those who propose for your products i.e. negotiation, and winners are those who actually buy a product from you.
Why are sales funnel important for business?
A sales funnel filters the qualified leads that convert into customers. Also, you can collect leads from each sales funnel stage and retarget those who could not convert.
If someone engages in your post but bounces out without converting, you can track and know that individual’s behaviour. Also, you can fill up that missing piece or update effectively to change your strategy for better conversions.
The more you test the funnel, the more leaks you discover and recover the leaks for more conversions.
Courses available for learning social media marketing:
Knowledge about social media marketing can be gained while sitting on your couch, and there are many online courses available for you to learn at no cost. You don’t need to visit an institute to learn it or study books. You can learn through Google, YouTube videos, and many more.
Here are some of the best sites that provide you with detailed information on social media marketing:
1. Coursera.org (What is Social?)
Coursera is a trusted online learning platform founded by a Stanford professor in 2011, with 280 active employees working to teach you for free. You can achieve and earn a credential from top universities like Yale, Michigan, and Stanford, and soon you can add on your C.V. to increase your potentiality.
2. Udemy.com (Social Media Monitoring)
Udemy is the largest online learning platform in the World, with 30million+ students and 50,000 instructors with over 60 languages. You can get any kind of education-related knowledge with udemy.
3. HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Academy is a worldwide leader that provides free online training courses and educates people. It is specialized in comprehensive certifications and grows the career and business of its students. If you want marketing knowledge, this site is perfect for you.
4. Skillshare.com
Skillshare is another great online learning platform with educational videos. The majority of the courses are focused on interaction (practical) rather than lecturing the student. It provides 2 months of a free learning environment and charges you for its course. More than 7million+ students are active, with 25,000+ classes available.
5. Lynda.com
Lynda is an American online learning platform website offering expert video courses. It was founded in 1995 by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin. I have attended many courses on Lynda.com and found it helpful for my career. It also provides you with course completion certificates that glorify your C.V.
8 Steps to Create a social media strategy for your company.
Now, learning everything about social media marketing, you might think of starting your own company and growing your digital business. Also, I have collected some steps to create social media strategies for your successful marketing business for your ease.
1. Identify your business goal
This is the first thing you must do before running a business. You need to identify your goal and do everything to reach that goal. Identifying and planning before starting the business helps lead you to the right pathway.
2. Content planning
Your contents are the source of your social media marketing. There is huge competition in creating better content day by day. From text status to images and well-explained videos, people are creating engaging and attractive content that gains more leads and conversions.
People want something creative and extra every time they scroll down their social media pages. So, take your time and plan for really great content.
3. Social Media Calendar
The social media calendar works like your normal calendar, guiding your daily routine. Having your personal calendar that defines your job for that particular day can save you time and protects you from missing the job.
Everything will be well organized and pre-planned when you have a calendar, as it shows every upcoming event.
Benefits of social media calendar:
- Never miss important updates
- Save time
- Organize content
- Effectively allocate resources
- Collaborate Easily
4. Perform Social Media Audit
Before you start, you must examine every bit of knowledge about social media, like its advantages and drawbacks. Your audit should be once a week, if possible, where you might discover fraudulent accounts using your business name.
There should be a clear picture of your social media marketing and whether it is progressing. If any fault occurs in the time-space, you can act accordingly and look for a solution.
5. Understanding your audience
Understand your audience and do what works best for them, creating a friendly environment with your audiences. Your audience is the stairway to success, carrying the maximum percentage to convert into customers.
Inspect the audience’s behaviour and find their interest, then target them as your customers while advertising your products. It will increase the chances of sales and leads.
6. Grow your community
The larger your community, the more your audience and customers you will have. Without any audiences to visit your site, there is no use of social media marketing. So, create your fan-followers as much as possible and have a healthy relationship with all the members.
Always treat your followers with huge respect, as they follow you for a reason.
7. Competitor Analysis
Everywhere you go or anything you do, there is a competitor that you must overcome and get better than them. Competitor analysis is a great marketing strategy to find out the strength and weaknesses of the competitor.
By learning about the success story of the competitor, you can get even better and lead your business to success.
8. Remarketing
Remarketing is the process of marketing to those individuals who were unable to connect at the very first attempt. In this process, while remarketing, you can inspect that visitor’s behaviour and know the reason that couldn’t lead them to convert into a customer. After that, you correct those issues and remarket them, which increases the chances of conversion and generates sales from that same customer.
Future of Social Media Marketing in Nepal
You can see clearly the bright future of Social Media Marketing in Nepal with the current status as well. Every day more and more people are getting involved in social media marketing, including myself, because of its effectiveness.
In every digital marketing agency in Nepal, people focus more on the social media team, which plays a vital role in marketing. The demand for social media managers is increasing due to their importance in marketing agencies.
No doubt, the rating of social media stats of Nepal will rise in a few years of time span. If you are new to the business, get started to get involved in social media marketing for your growth of 200%. Social Media Marketing doesn’t seem to end its priority until the existence of human beings. Finally, the future of social media marketing in Nepal and worldwide is secured.
Conclusion
Hence, social media marketing could be your life-changing opportunity if you are running a business. So, get involved and create your social media accounts on every possible abovementioned platform. It is really essential to take advantage of technology that could change your business, i.e. social media marketing.
So, when are you creating your own social media market for your business?